"When the Roman Forum fell, freedom fell!" roared Texas' old Tom Connally at his colleagues last week. The Senate was considering a petition to shut off, by invoking cloture, the filibuster that Senator Connally and his Southern friends had carried on for 17 days against the Wagner-Van Nuys Anti-Lynching Bill (TIME, Jan. 24). The cloture motion needed two thirds of the votes to succeed. It failed, 37 votes to 51.
This arithmetic clearly showed the bill's sponsors that, of the 70-odd Senators whose votes had been counted on to pass it, a respectable majority of Democrats were glad for a...
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